I Shall Live (40 page)

It was a historic moment. This time we had no trouble communicating with our liberator, who wanted to know how far it was to Rostock. Of course we had no idea. He was friendly but more hardened by war, and seemed to be in a hurry. He didn't greet us with the same happiness at our being freed that we had sensed from the English, which was disappointing.

The Polish truck driver found a key in the ignition of one of the small German trucks and got the engine started. We decided to drive to the nearest town. The road was jammed with vehicles, but the fields around were very flat, so we drove alongside the road, just off it. After a few hundred feet we saw a sign: “Rostock—7 kilometers.” We continued in that direction, and ten minutes later we were in the
outskirts of Rostock, a fairly large town, with ruins everywhere. The Allied bombers had done a thorough job. There were a few German civilians on the streets, and they looked alarmed when they saw us.

When we got closer to the center of town, we saw groups of German soldiers standing about. As we approached the central square we had to slow down to a crawl because the streets were increasingly crowded with soldiers. Finally we entered the central town square, and it was a spectacular sight, literally jampacked with tens of thousands of German soldiers milling around aimlessly.

Sam, Warshawski, and I were standing in the open in back of the truck and saw it all. It looked like Times Square in New York on New Year's Eve (as I was to see it before long), except that here in Rostock they weren't celebrating; they looked dispirited and exhausted. Some of them were just standing about with their mouths drooping, their eyes vacant, and a generally hangdog air. They certainly looked like the remnants of a defeated army. Rifles, machine guns, and hand guns were piled up in several spots around the square, although a few of the soldiers were still carrying their weapons. There was not a single Allied soldier in sight. It was a great thrill to see the hated German army in such a bedraggled condition. We were jumping up and down, shaking our fist at the Germans and making throat-slashing gestures with our hands. We were still wearing our striped prison uniforms, and it was just plain dumb luck that one of the soldiers who still had his gun didn't take a shot at us. Perhaps the spectacle of such total dejection somehow made us feel they lacked the spirit to do it. Still, it was incredibly stupid of us to run such an unnecessary risk on the very day of our liberation.

We were slowly making headway through the crowds when suddenly we noticed a lone Russian soldier surrounded by many German soldiers. Coming closer, we saw his jacket lying on the
ground, with hundreds of watches piled on it. He was ordering all the Germans around him to hand over their watches to him, and they were sheepishly following his orders.

We left the square and drove around until we saw a group of English officers. These spoke broken French, which I could make out, and they directed us to a temporary shelter, where we found other English army officers who had been assigned to give aid to liberated concentration camp inmates.

We spent the rest of the day taking it easy and talking to other ex-prisoners. We were in a state of nervous excitement and exhaustion. Our hearts were filled with joy, but it was mixed with sadness. I thought of my parents and their cruel death, and of Fred, Felek, and Hanka. I was worried about what might have happened to them, and longed to find them alive and well.

Sam and I had been assigned a small room in the shelter, and I went to bed early that evening. I was dizzy with the thoughts and images that were whirling in my mind, but I finally fell asleep.

I woke up early in the morning not knowing at first where I was. A ray of light was shining through the window, and suddenly I remembered that I was free! The stone in the pit of my stomach that I had felt every time I woke up in the camps and realized where I was was gone. I started to cry. I had cried like that only once before—on October 28, 1942, the day my father and mother were murdered.

After a while I dried my tears and got up. I went to the door and looked outside. It was a beautiful morning in May. The sun was rising and the birds were singing. A new day was about to begin.

We spent about two weeks in Rostock recuperating from the effects of our imprisonment in the camps and the death march. The shelter was not very comfortable by normal standards, but compared to what we had known before, it was luxury. There was plenty of food, and we gained weight rapidly and soon started to look like human beings again. The UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the other international relief organizations treated us very well. But it was heartbreaking to see so many ex-inmates die after they were liberated. Some never recovered from the effects of extreme malnutrition; others died from the dysentery they had developed from eating grass during the death march, or from overeating after they had been freed. A few of the liberated prisoners took revenge on the German civilians around Rostock, beating them up and robbing them, but most of us didn't. How could we tell a good German from a bad one? Suddenly it was impossible to find a German who had
ever been a member of the Nazi party. I never even considered trying to hurt any Germans at random; what if one of them happened to be a person like Willie, the brave German political prisoner I had known in Ravensbrück?

There were rumors that the Russians were going to take over Rostock and the surrounding area now being occupied by the Allies. Sam and I were impatient to find out what had happened to the rest of our family, and as soon as we felt strong enough we decided to go back to Poland. We said good-bye to Warshawski and the others we had become friendly with, and went to the railroad station. Since no passenger trains were running, we struck out in the general direction of central Poland, traveling in cattle cars, army supply trains, and any other transportation we could find. When we were chased out of one, we changed over to another, as long as it was heading east.

We had heard that Warsaw had been completely destroyed, but that there were still Jews in łód
ź
, the second largest city in Poland. By chance in łód
ź
we found Motie Orenstein, a second cousin, who kindly invited us to stay in his apartment. While there we heard rumors that the entire contingent of Hrubieszów women who had been sent with us to Budzy
ń
from Jatkowa had been murdered in Stuthoff, a concentration camp near Danzig. Hanka had been among them. Someone had heard that Fred was in Amberg, in Germany, and that Felek had been killed in the last days of the war. We had no confirmation of any of this, no witnesses. We learned too that a few Jews had gone back to Hrubieszów. Anxious for more information, we decided to return to our hometown. We found it virtually undamaged by the war, but out of the prewar Jewish population of Hrubieszów, some eight or nine thousand, we found only five Jews left in the town.

We stayed a few days in Hrubieszów, where we heard that the local Poles who had taken over the houses and property of Jews were
worried now that those who had survived the war would return and reclaim them. We were told that three Jews who came out of hiding were killed by Poles. A man whom we had known well before the war came to see us and advised us to leave town. He heard talk that Poles who were living in our father's building were planning to kill us. Sam managed to sell one small store in the building to a tenant at a ridiculously low price, and we left in a hurry, heading back to łód
ź
. (The other Jews also left Hrubieszów, and today there is not one Jew living in our hometown.)

We stayed several more weeks in łód
ź
, hoping for further news about our family, and in the meantime began to think about what to do with our lives. I wanted to leave for the American Occupation Zone in Germany, try to find Fred, and emigrate to the United States. Sam decided to stay in Poland, feeling that as a lawyer he could practice his profession only there, that in any other country he would have language difficulties. “In my profession,” he said, “language is our most important asset. What could I do outside Poland as a lawyer?” I told him that I didn't want to live under the Communists, and furthermore that I was convinced that the great majority of Poles hadn't changed and would always remain anti-Semitic. Although only about fifty thousand Jews remained in Poland out of the three million, three hundred thousand who had lived there before the war, that was still far too many for most Poles.

One day when I was sitting on a bench in a park in łód
ź
reading a newspaper, I overheard a conversation between two Polish women who were having their lunch on the other side of the bench. “At least Hitler did one good thing: he got rid of the Jews,” one of them remarked. The other commented, “Yes, but he should have finished the job.”

That was the last straw for me. I went back to the apartment and told Sam that I was leaving for Germany immediately, to look for
Fred. Sam was still determined to stay, so I got ready to leave and we hugged and kissed each other good-bye. It was a sad moment; we had never been separated since Felek and he had come to Ołyka for their summer vacation early in June 1941, just before the Germans attacked Russia.

I traveled through southern Poland, Prague, and western Czechoslovakia, finally arriving in Amberg, where I found Fred in a rehabilitation center for former concentration-camp inmates, wearing an UNRRA uniform and working as a doctor. He looked wonderful. Emotion overcame us completely. We both burst into tears, and hugged and kissed each other over and over. He confirmed the rumors we had heard that Felek had been killed by the SS. With a breaking heart I listened to his story.

About a week or two after Sam and I had left the Płaszów camp with the other “mathematicians,” the SS had evacuated the rest of the Chemiker Kommando to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany. As with us in Sachsenhausen, it had taken a while but eventually their professor too had appeared, set up their Kommando in an empty barracks, and set them to work again on the same phony projects as before. After a few weeks the part of the Kommando that was working on the “immobilizing gas” was moved to Kraków, in Poland, where they continued their work until they were evacuated to Auschwitz. The others, including Fred and Felek, continued on in Flossenbürg until the end of April. Their professor ran out of projects for them, so during the last two months he arranged for crates of old World War I books on military strategy to be shipped to them, their new assignment being to search for weapons left over from 1918 that might have been stashed away somewhere and overlooked by the German army, and if found could still be brought out and used. The “sting” was still going on. At the end of April, Fred, Felek, and about two thousand other
Jews from Flossenbürg had been put on a train that was destined for the Dachau concentration camp.

A few of the prisoners, knowing that the Allied planes were continuously bombing German trains, attached their striped jackets to the roofs of the cars as a signal to the pilots that theirs was a prisoner-of-war transport. This worked for a few days; the Allied fighter planes were concentrating on attacking the locomotive, hitting none of the cars behind with the prisoners. The train made very slow progress because the locomotives kept getting hit and had to be replaced several times. The last attack occurred in the station at a small town, and this time the Allied pilot strafed the cars as well. About thirty prisoners were killed, and another hundred and thirty wounded, among them Felek. A bullet shattered his knee. The SS officer in charge of the transport decided that this time he would not try to get a replacement for the locomotive, and ordered the evacuation to continue on foot. The wounded prisoners were taken out of the cars and moved to one side of the track.

When Fred saw that the wounded were going to be left behind at the station, he went to the officer and told him that he was a doctor, and that many of the wounded needed immediate help. He requested permission to stay with them, but the officer refused, saying that it was unnecessary because the Americans would be arriving very soon and would take good care of the wounded. Fred persisted, telling the officer that some of the wounded couldn't wait for the Americans but needed immediate help, and that as a doctor he had an obligation to stay with them. But the officer was adamant and ordered Fred to join the other prisoners, who were about to leave, surrounded by SS guards. So Fred was forced to leave Felek.

They marched for several days with nothing to eat. The prisoners who were unable to continue were killed on the spot, as had been the case with us. At night they were locked up in barns. Fred developed
an infection in his elbow and became feverish with hallucinations. On the fourth morning of the march the SS guards ordered the prisoners to form a column. Fred was in the first row of five, with his friend Dr. Schindel. Suddenly a tank appeared on the road in front of the barn, only a few yards away. Fred noticed that, instead of the German cross, it bore a star. “Americans!” he screamed. He and the other four prisoners in the first row lunged toward the tank. The guards had seen the tank too. They threw down their weapons and started running into the fields. Some of the stronger prisoners ran after them and caught a few of them, whom they killed with their bare hands in a matter of minutes.

Fred simply sat down and leaned against the tank, feeling no emotion, only total exhaustion. An American soldier leaned out of the tank, patted him on the shoulder, and gave him a pack of Lucky Strikes. Fred started to weep. The soldier told the prisoners to return to the town where they had left the train; the American troops there had facilities to take care of them.

They walked back to the town, where they found that the SS had killed all hundred thirty of the wounded prisoners immediately after Fred and the others had been marched off. They machine-gunned them right where they were lying by the side of the tracks, and buried them in a mass grave. Immediately after the town was liberated the American officer in charge ordered the townspeople to open the grave and take the bodies out. He ordered caskets to be made for the murdered prisoners, but there weren't enough workmen available to make a casket for each one, so two bodies were placed in each casket and they were buried again. So died my brother Felek, a few days before the liberation.